Jacko - We Gave Away A Soft Goal

Manager Mike Jackson has said that we effectively gifted Walsall the winner last weekend.

Speaking to the Official Site following the game, Jackson admitted that the players were clearly tired as we went behind to the early goal and failed then to really give ourselves a shot of getting back into the match, and a greater disappointment for him was that this was our fifth game away from home in succession where we have failed to find the net.

'We've given away a soft goal and you can't do that. When you concede early like that the energy levels go down and they've gone down enough as it is with seven games in the last 21 days. We've got to dust ourselves down from this disappointment. I think there's been a few draws in and around us and we've got two home games to look forward to after five our of six away.'

Jackson is clearly hoping home advantage can give us a bit of momentum again now as we head into the last few games of the season and we could definitely do with that boost now.

As for the Walsall game a bit more specifically, the gaffer goes on to say that Woodsy said the ball took a bit of a deflection of his foot for their opener, but he would need to see it again, but it was effectively the last thing we needed as he knew we had to remain tight in the first half and try and frustrate them and he says that he didn't want us 'to roll it out at the back' in the early parts of the game because he knows how threatening Walsall can be, but unfortunately we did just that, got caught square and they have put it in the back of the net and unfortunately for us, that was game over.

'We started to get a bit of possession to our game but I thought we took too long in possession. We needed to move the ball quicker and I told them that at half time.'

The gaffer goes on to say that he felt we were taking three or four more touches than we needed to when trying to go forward and all that did was allow them to get back into position and get nine odd men behind the ball and it removed the space we could've exploited.

'After the sending off we ran out of legs. And it was running out of legs rather than ideas, it just caught up with us after so many games.'

Jackson goes on to say that although you make your own luck in football, we certainly didn't get any as despite the introduction of Jon Taylor to try and quicken things up, he was feeling his calf within five minutes of being on the pitch so 'you're down to ten men and one of those is injured.'

Ultimately though he just concedes that we simply didn't test the goalkeeper enough and when we did get the ball into good areas of their half of the pitch, we didn't do enough then to make the most of them.

He still believes we are in a good position though, and if we can kick on, get those energy levels back up and start matches brighter, he's confident we can pick up the points we need.